Coming Home is a Process
"The mark of successful sojourners is not that they have finally come to appreciate fully the true meaning of home, or that they may have relinquished one home for another more suited to them, but that they have found two places where they can go out and in."
-Paraphrased from T.J. Lewis and R.E. Jungmar, 1986
While coming home may seem like a straightforward process, it actually involves some re-adjustment and lots of learning.
In many ways, the process is similar to the cultural adjustment you probably experienced when you first went abroad; but re-adjusting to home may feel even stranger or be more upsetting because we generally don't expect to have to re-adjust to familiar surroundings. However, during your time abroad, you undoubtedly changed and grew in a variety of ways, both personally and intellectually.
Coming home thus involves figuring out how to integrate the parts of you that are new into your old life.
In a sense, coming home offers you a time to re-make yourself! This can be both challenging and exciting; and the challenge is compounded by the fact that you may not even realize the ways in which you've changed until you have spent some time at home.
Re-adjusting to life at home is an important part of the growth and learning process involved in study abroad.
In fact, much of the learning from your study abroad experience will occur from this point on, as your experience "sinks in" and you have the necessary distance and time to reflect on all that has happened to you in the last semester or year. It is from this time of re-adjustment forward that you will truly develop your "global citizen" skills, namely, the competence to move between and in and out of different cultures.
